


Before the thunder, the end

by liripip



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fall of Overwatch, He Got Better, M/M, Strained Relationships, idiots with benefits, sorta - Freeform, stress and angst and fear oh my
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 09:51:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19809826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liripip/pseuds/liripip
Summary: Talon has infiltrated Blackwatch, and Gabriel can't trust anyone but Jack.Jack can't even trust Gabriel.





	Before the thunder, the end

**Author's Note:**

> My entry for the 2019 R76 Reverse Big Bang, written in collaboration with and inspired by the brilliant Bikti ([tumblr](https://bikti.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/two2pizza)) and this fantastic piece of art: 
> 
> Bikti, it was great fun brainstorming this with you! I did my best to capture the feel of the image and I hope you enjoy the end result :)

Gabriel startles awake with an itch between his shoulder blades, skin prickling with unease. He feels like there is some kind of predator hiding in the shadows, biding its time to attack the second he lets his guard down. Weary, he rubs the grit out of his eyes and works at the crick in his neck, before looking over his desktop to see what had awoken him. A message alert blinks slowly in the corner of his monitor.

Hope flickers to life within him, and dissipates within a moment. The message is a check-in from Bravo team, and sure, he’s glad they’re all safe, but Bravo team is not why he’s sleeping in his office chair this night.

And no, it’s not because of his latest row with the Strike-Commander, either.

  
_Fuck._ What was supposed to be simple, two old friends too busy for relationships just helping each other out, has turned into a bigger mess than Gabriel’s marriage ever was. Friends with benefits? _Hah_. Try friends with liabilities. At least his divorce proceedings never risked involving the Hague Tribunal.

He reaches for his coffee mug and tilts it, looking at the dregs in disappointment, then writes a short reply.

No, it’s not Bravo team he’s worried about. It’s Delta. It’s not like Moreno to be late for a check-in, and it’s certainly not normal for her comms guy Singh to stay offline for a second more than necessary. Singh probably talks more than the rest of Blackwatch put together, and Gabriel wasn’t prepared to miss the chatter. He sighs, and checks on the agent he dispatched earlier tonight to go check out Delta’s safehouse. Blackwatch being suspended means he’s lost access to the Orcas, and his closest agent had been half a continent away. It’s going to be morning again in Zürich before she gets to Delta’s Chennai location, and Gabriel sitting awake worrying about it isn’t helping anyone.

He stays though, because if he decides to go to bed he’ll have to make a choice between Jack’s room or his own.

He’s halfway through a report on the latest attack in Korea, the first hint of dawn outlining the Alps in the distance, when a call comes in.

“Charu,” he answers, fumbling his headset into place. “What’s your status?”

“I’m within view of the safehouse. Everything looks normal from outside.”

Gabriel pulls up the live feed he’s had monitored since he started getting a bad feeling about things. It hasn’t notified him, so there has been no movement to or from the safehouse itself, but the quiet side-street has woken up since he last looked at it. A few people are walking by, a delivery bike stands leaning against a wall, an elderly woman is watering a plant outside her door. Charu’s location beacon pulses gently from corner store some fifty meters away.

Jack’s probably going to yell at him for commandeering his surveillance satellite, too. _Suck it, boyscout,_ Gabriel thinks, _that’s what you get when you don’t change your password for eleven years_.

“Alright,” he says, bringing up the plans of the safehouse on his monitor. “Approach casually but keep your weapons ready. Auth code is 7264-” He waits for her to reach the keypad, her sidearm hidden in the bag she pretends to rummage in. “2492-1135. I’ve authorized your biometrics.”

The satellite feed is just barely fast enough to catch a frame of her leaning forward to the peephole to have her iris scanned.

“The door’s open.”

“Proceed.” Gabriel isn’t sure when he stood up, the holographic displays adjusting automatically. It just feels weird to sit in a chair when he’s this tense.

“They’ve been here,” Charu reports under her breath. “Comm station’s half set up. Most of their gear’s unpacked…”

“Any sign of trouble?”

“Apart from them being gone? Not yet. Kitchen and dining room are clear.”

“You’ve got three bedrooms and two bathrooms to the back.”

“And the upper floors?”

“There’s no access, unless you find a hugeass hole in the ceiling—” Gabriel hears Charu gasp. Cold, faintly grainy coffee splashes over his hand as he upsets the cup, leaning forward towards the satellite image of the building as if that could tell him something. “Charu? Agent, _report!_ ”

“It’s Jozef. He’s been… stabbed through the eye.” Charu sounds sick, and Gabriel wishes he’d had someone with more experience to send into this. “He’s dead.”

Gabriel sighs. He was expecting it, really, now he just needs to figure out _how_. “Signs of struggle?”

He hears her finishing a prayer before she answers.

“No. He’s still in his bed, he must have been asleep —”

Gabriel’s memory jumps to Gérard, found dead in his bed. It’s a meaningless association, not nearly enough to base a decision on, but Gabriel’s instincts takes the warning anyway and runs with it.

“Get out of there,” he tells his agent, keeping half an eye on the sat feed of the street. Moreno and the rest of her team are most likely dead. He’ll need confirmation, yes, but something about the situation sets his teeth on edge. He can have Echo team wrap up quickly and on site in a couple days, and—

“He’s cold, sir, I don’t think anyone’s been here for—”

“Yes, agent, now get o—”

“Oh!” Charu exclaims, interrupting him. “ Lieutenant Mor—” Her words are cut off by a wet gurgle and crackling from her headset being manhandled, and Gabriel yells into his microphone even though he knows there’s nothing words can do for her anymore.

“Commander,” is purred into his headset, and it’s Moreno’s _voice_ but not her tone. “I have a message from Doomfist.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrow. They put that scumbag in maximum security, but aside from the poorer tailoring it doesn’t seem to be holding him back much.

“What.” He spits the words out, fingers already flying over his controls to call in all active teams. _Abort, split up, go underground. We’re compromised. Trust no one._

“We’re coming,” Moreno purrs — formal, no-nonsense Emilia Moreno, with a stick so far up her ass she can’t even bend to reach her knees — and then she smacks a kiss into the microphone before cutting the signal.

Gabriel stares at the sat feed, noting his team-leaders checking off on his abort-message one after the other. The door opens, and a figure steps out, and though the image is grainy and slow, it does look like Moreno when he plays it back and forth. He’s not sure if he has a harder time believing she would murder her team or that she would ever blow him a kiss.

Thoroughly unnerved, he picks up his phone and calls Jack’s private number.

\---

_This isn’t happening_ , Jack tells himself as he takes refuge behind the rim of his paper cup. _This is a nightmare and I’m going to wake up soon._ The coffee is bad, and he really wishes there was some whiskey mixed in. Arguments that can usually keep him sober well into the afternoon, such as ‘It’s six in the morning, Jack _’,_ seem to have temporarily lost their persuasive power in the wake of Gabriel’s newest misadventure.

Jack shakes his head. He cannot _believe_ that Gabriel just flat out murdered some guy, on base, and then just… Left him, on the floor, for the authorities to find.

It’s… It’s almost funny. Jack does his best to make compromises. He understands that the world still needs Blackwatch, even when the public is one incident away from burning Gabriel in effigy in the streets. Jack’s just asking for some semblance of plausible deniability, because without it the entire organization is going to go belly up the next time Gabriel fucks something up.

Which is now, apparently. Approximately twelve hours since their latest fight about it.

Maybe Jack was wrong about why he didn’t come to bed last night. Maybe he was already leaving the country on a fake passport and not just sulking in his office.

He gathers his wits and puts on his official face.

“Who is he?” he asks the officer in charge. His voice is calm but empathic, appropriate for the seriousness of the situation. Behind his professional expression, he’s cataloging the room, trying to figure out what happened.

The room looks… normal, with nothing obvious out of place apart from the coverall-clad figure lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the floor. The door is broken open, though the police have taken responsibility for that. There are bloody bootprints leading off from the body and out the door, where they lead into a bathroom in the connecting hallway and stop. Those are definitely Gabriel’s, and Jack is confused by them because Gabriel has a bathroom of his own. Why track bloody footprints all over the dormitory corridor? Did he _want_ this guy found? If so, why?

And, the question that Jack’s going to lie awake prodding at: why didn’t he call? At what point did Jack start finding things out from the cops and not from Gabe himself?

“His name is Peter Elzbacher,” the officer says, frowning at her datapad for a few moments. “Swiss national, employed by Daust and Oberzenner uh, Air and Ventilation. I take it you’re not familiar with him?”

“Unfortunately not. We have dozens of civilian contractors working with us every day.” Jack says, motioning to the body- “May I?”

The officer exchanges a glance with the crime scene tech who nods uncertainly after a second. Jack doesn’t wait for them to change their minds.

Elzbacher, if that is indeed his name, is lying on his front, and when Jack carefully lifts his shoulder he gets full view of the gory slash through his throat. It looks like it was done quick and rough, but with something very very sharp — his closest comparison would be the wounds Shimada was brought in with.

Gabriel doesn’t fancy blades. Another detail that doesn’t add up.

“Hmm,” the officer intones, looking around. “The door says Reyes. Is that the same Reyes that..?”

Jack briefly entertains lying. It’s a common enough name. They’ve even got another Reyes on base, working in Engineering. He wonders if Valeria would take one for the team if he asked nicely.

“Commander Gabriel Reyes, yes,” he says instead, and because he’s found that the public sometimes needs reminding, he adds “The one who led Overwatch through the Crisis.”

“Ah,” she says delicately, in a way that makes it entirely clear that she has Venice and the chaotic aftermath in fresher memory. “Still commander, then?”

Jack schools his face, keeps it neutral. “Suspended, not demoted,” he says.

“Hmm,” she grunts with an unimpressed air, scrolling through her data pad. “We’ll need to question him, obviously. We’ll also need your security footage.”

“We will of course assist you with the angles that impact your investigation,” Jack says, smoothly powering through the objection she has only just opened her mouth to voice. “It is a large facility, and much of what we do is classified.”

The officer chews on her cheek for a moment.

“This dormitory area, and the access points to this floor,” she says. Jack quickly runs over the base layout in his head, and can’t think of any reason to say no.

“I’ll make sure it’s made available.”

“Thank you. You wouldn’t happen to know Mr. Reyes’ whereabouts?”

Jack is just about to say something evasive when his phone buzzes in his pocket. _Oh shi_ — His wristcomm helpfully flashes a little photo of Gabriel — at least it’s his official personnel photo, Jack has that much professionalism _unlike some people_ — and the officer tilts her head curiously, trying to see. Jack angles his wrist away from her and makes aggressive eye-contact, trying to force her gaze to his face with the power of his stare.

“I don’t,” he says, tapping his earpiece. “Pardon me.”

She doesn’t, and he takes the call anyway.

“Jack,” Gabriel says, his voice pressed. “We have a situation. One of —”

“Milton, how are you!” Jack cuts him off. Milton was one of the doctors that worked on them during the SEP, and one of the most singularly unpleasant people Jack has ever had the misfortune to know. Invoking his name has become their own private signal of alarm and warning. Gabriel quiets. “Yes,” Jack says, his eyes flickering to the officer. She’s blatantly listening. “I did read your message, I understand,” he improvises, trying to act like he has nothing to hide. At least he’s wearing his headset: She won’t be able to hear anything on Gabriel’s end, but Jack has to measure his words carefully

“Moreno’s Talon,” Gabriel says, and Jack grunts his assent. They’ll need to figure out how this Elzbacher — Moreno’s alias? — could get so deep into the base. “Can you talk?”

“Not at the moment,” Jack replies, using that as an excuse to pull out his phone and check his schedule. “I’m prioritizing it.” Can he send a message? How does he tell Gabriel to stay out of sight without tipping the curious cop next to him off?

“Are you in danger?”

“No no, that’s alright,” Jack continues on in his professional voice. _Ops room_ , he manages to type out in a calendar appointment, inviting Gabe from his list of frequent contacts. He sees the officer looking at him attentively. “I’m afraid I have a bit of a situation on my hands right now, but I’d be delighted to schedule a meeting ASAP.”

“Am _I_ in danger?” Gabriel asks in his ear.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.” _secret_ , he adds in the title field. He’s gonna be screwed if she asks to see his phone. Is that within her authority? His phone buzzes as Gabriel accepts the meeting, and Jack quickly deletes the appointment.

_Phew_.

Now to extricate himself from this situation.

\---

What. The hell. Gabriel frowns at his phone, where Jack’s weird meeting was just canceled. Secret ops room meeting? What’s going on?

Still, Milton’s name has been dropped, and Gabriel has never known Jack to invoke the sadistic asshole lightly. So… To the ops room, he supposes. Unseen. Luckily, Gabriel is a paranoid bastard who long ago got himself unlimited access to the base security systems. He grabs his datapad and brings up the security camera from the corridor outside his office. Empty. _Secret_ , Jack had said. Better not run into anyone, then.

Gabriel turns off the recording function of all the cameras in the vicinity. With all of the video feeds shown in a grid on his pad, he steps out and makes sure the door locks behind him. Clear, clear — he has a moment of disorientation trying to figure out which camera shows the view around a corner — Clear. His heart is pounding: This is more difficult than he gave it credit for. He hears an approaching voice and finds it on one of the camera feeds — It’s Moira, talking into that recorder thing she keeps to hide that she talks to herself. What way is she going, shit this is confusing — Gabriel gives up on trying to wrap his head around the fractured geometry of overlapping camera feeds and makes a break for the bathroom down the hall. It is, thankfully, not occupied.

Gabriel takes a deep breath and forces himself to be calm. On the video feed, Moira looks up from her notes and glances around, before continuing on her path. Slow and steady, he reminds himself. He just hates not knowing what is going on or how severe the threat is, that’s all. Outside the door, he hears Moira’s clipped tones as she talks to her recorder.

Okay, he thinks once she is safely past, gathering his wits. It’s about a two minute walk to the ops room. He’d make it there in under a minute if he ran for it, but that’s likely to attract attention. He can monitor anyone coming into the area, but there are both dorms, offices and training rooms along the way and someone could step out of one at any moment. _Hmm,_ he thinks, glancing at the smoke detector. Well, Jack didn’t tell him to not be _heard_ , did he?

Lighting a wad of toilet paper on fire is quick work, and it doesn’t take many moments of the white smoke wafting up towards the detector before a shrill alarm starts blaring. Gabriel catapults out the door just as the sprinklers kick into life behind him, and manages to dash around the next corner before the first door opens. Distraction in place, he keeps one eye on the camera feeds and another on the surroundings until he reaches the corridor with the ops room, right at the edge of Blackwatch territory. Only three people have access — two now, if Ana’s truly gone. He still can’t believe it. It’s not denial if you know in your gut that she’s still out there, is it?

He shakes his head to clear it. Wherever Ana is, she’s on her own for the moment.

Alright — He checks the cameras. Clear. Stepping up to the door, he presses his palm to the scanner, and soon the vault-like door opens with a soft pneumatic sigh. Gabriel steps inside, unseen, and seals himself in. There. The Overwatch Command Operations Room is a sealed bunker with separate everything: Air, electricity, communications — It’s not exactly impenetrable, but nothing but a dedicated demolitions crew with time and supplies could get inside here without authorization. The three of them even take turns to clean up in here. There’s still a gaggle of empty tea cups at Ana’s place, and neither he nor Jack have had the heart to take them away yet.

_Enough, Gabriel_ , he tells himself. _Don’t get emotional over fucking crockery_.

Oookaay. He’s where Jack told him to be. He still has no idea what’s going on, but he has his own problem to work on while he waits for Jack to show up and explain. He activates his station and checks through his updates. Most of his teams have acknowledged the retreat orders, and a couple have already submitted their travel plans to him. They’re dropping into their backup identities, booking airline tickets and renting cars, moving unobtrusively through the world in ones and twos. That’ll do.

Next, Moreno. Her turning on him is disturbing: Gabriel prides himself on getting a good read of people, and she’s played him completely. He’s always been cautious, but ever since Gérard died that caution and suspicion has twisted into something Gabriel himself worries about — is it paranoia if they’re really out to get you? And still, he had suspected _nothing_. It’s unnerving.

He begins to go through her personnel logs, checking her communications and movements through the past months. Her messages… Nothing that stands out. Her keycard logs… unremarkable. Her medical checkups? Normal. He’s just skimming for a first overview, but… On a hunch, he checks over her team’s access logs as well, and ends up blinking in confusion. There are entries for Singh, in Zürich, tonight. What the… Gabriel quickly taps into the security footage and finds the main entrance, entering the timestamp from the logs. Sure enough, there he is, Raji Singh just waltzing in like he wasn’t presumed KIA.

Fuck, Gabriel was sitting in his office fretting about him right when he was entering the base.

Gabriel thinks, pinching the bridge of his nose. So Singh is in league with Moreno. _Spec-fucking-tacular_. And he’s in the base, with his Blackwatch access still active because Gabriel hadn’t thought to restrict it because he assumed he was fucking dead. Blowing air out through his front teeth, Gabriel sets about remedying that before tracking him on the security records, following the route marked by his palm print blipping through scanners. The last entry is at the elevator exit in the Blackwatch area, just a couple corridors down from his own office.

Gabriel rolls his shoulders, pretending there isn’t a chill running down his spine. Frantically, he searches the cameras. Singh gets out, Singh enters the very same bathroom Gabriel had hidden from Moira in, Singh does not come out. Gabriel frowns at the feed as he fast-forwards. Is there another way out? He’s _pretty sure_ Singh wasn’t hiding in a corner when Gabriel was setting off the fire alarm. He puts the forwarding speed to maximum and zips through it, watching a handful of people including himself enter and leave the frame — one or two even enter the bathroom, and come out a couple minutes later with no sign of anything remarkable. Gabriel puts alerts on their cards anyway. He’ll get back to them later, but first he has a loose Talon agent to deal with… Fuck, this is serious. Singh has had hours to do whatever he’s planning to do, be it another bombing or… Gabriel calls Jack. Jack declines the call. Gabriel calls again, and this time the tone drones on in his ears without a response. _Fucking hell,_ but Gabriel is _not_ living through the Rome bombing again. He begins looking through the evac procedures, and that’s when he hears the door begin to open.

\---

“Good morning to you too,” Jack says with all the gentle warmth of the arctic winter, sidestepping out of the direct path of the shotgun Gabriel is pointing at him. “You could have called.” He walks in and keys in the closing command of the heavy steel doors, and turns back around to the gun nowhere to be seen and traces of faintly metallic mist curling around Gabriel’s fingertips. He wonders if that will ever stop being weird.

“I called three times?” Gabriel says with a scowl, and Jack maintains his cool instead of sneering back at him. They’ll need at least one adult to get out of this.

“I meant _before_ the police —”

“Whatever.” Gabriel cuts him off, and Jack can feel his eye twitching. _Not like I was worried about you or anything. Asshole_. “We have a bigger problem.”

“Gabriel, what-”

“Remember Singh? The chatty one?” Gabriel taps at his station and brings up a picture of a vaguely familiar man.

“Gabriel.”

“He’s with Moreno, I guess, and—”

“ _Reyes._ ” Jack barks, and Gabriel looks up from his monitor, affront on his face. “The guy you killed. What the hell happened?”

“What guy? Listen—”

“For _fuck’s sake_ , Gabe, are you _trying_ to run this organization into the—”

“ _Jack._ ” Gabriel stabs his index finger through the holograms in front of him, making them ripple. “Talon is _here_.”

“I _figured,_ ” Jack says, just barely reigning in his temper. “ _Report._ ”

“The hell does it seem like I’m _trying_ to do?” Gabriel blinks at him with wide, glassy eyes and Jack is taken aback for a second. He seems… frightened. Somehow he’s been assuming that Gabriel didn’t immediately come to him for help because he can do it all himself, doesn’t actually need Jack for anything anymore, but maybe… Maybe the attack really frazzled him. And being Gabriel, he’s jumped straight at a conspiracy theory rather than dealing with the fallout of his own actions. Sounds about Gabe.

“Okay. You know Moreno, one of my team leaders?” Gabriel continues, and Jack nods though he doesn’t really. “She killed her team — or I thought so, maybe they’re all working with her. She’s Talon anyway. Her comms tech — this guy” he says, indicating the monitor, “was supposed to be with her in India, but he walked into base a couple hours ago. I tracked him as far as the Blackwatch wing but then the fucker disappeared.”

Jack feels his mouth go dry as Gabriel talks, his peripheral vision losing color as his gaze zeroes in on the image.

“How long has he been gone?”

“’bout three and a half hours.”

“ _WHAT?!_ Gabriel! _Why didn’t you tell me?_ ”

“ _I’ve been trying to! I’ve only known for like ten minutes!!_ ”

Jack’s heart pounds in his chest, and he instinctively looks over to Ana’s empty chair for support. Her absence feels like a great big hollow space, lodged somewhere between his lungs and sucking all the warmth out of him. Gabriel’s follows his line of sight with his eyes, closing them with a heavy sigh.

“She’d tell us to get everyone out of here.”

Jack hesitates for a second, then nods.

“She’d be right,” he says, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “Athena,” he continues, opening up a channel to the base AI. “Initiate evac procedures. As fast as you can.”

A second later, the alarm starts to blare, a bright red light flashing in time with the noise. Jack wordlessly steps up to the beacon and cracks the plastic casing with the butt of his handgun, yanking the wires out as soon as they’re exposed. The noise and flashing lights dies down, only a low echo of it audible through the thick walls of the room. Gabriel looks at him with his lips pressed into a thin line between his teeth, the red emergency lighting along the edges of the floor creating unfamiliar shadows on the planes of his face.

“Now what?” Gabriel asks, and a hidden part of Jack wishes _this_ wasn’t the day he would choose to adhere to the chain of command. He feels scared and lost and he wants the Gabriel of the Crisis there to tell him what to do.

But the Crisis is past and this is a new world, one where Jack is ultimately responsible for both of them.

“What’s our infiltrator’s last known location?”

“Here,” Gabriel says, bringing up a window showing a security feed of a corridor. “He went in that bathroom and never came out.”

“Where’s this?”

“Just down the hall from my office. I guess he must have—”

“The vents,” Jack says, leaning forward with his palms braced on the desk. “That guy in your quarters, he got in as a ventilation technician.”

Gabriel squints up at him.

“What guy?”

“The—” Jack says, with a sinking feeling in his stomach as Gabriel looks at him. “The dead man in your quarters? His throat was slit,” he tries, unease burning colder in his belly the longer Gabriel stares at him without recognition. “Your bootprints were all around him. That’s— That’s where I was when you called?”

“What?” Gabriel says, “No! I didn’t— I haven’t even been there. Hold on.” He turns back to his screen and begins tapping through the security system, and soon enough the feed is showing the corridor outside his quarters, the door open and the woman Jack had spoken to earlier hurrying two figures in coveralls toward the emergency exit down the hall. “The hell?” Gabriel says, and starts playing the video backwards. Jack sees himself hurry off in reverse, phone clutched in his hand, watches his entire conversation with the officer before his bleary-eyed arrival, coffee clutched like a lifeline.

Gabriel silently slides his hand over Jack’s and squeezes. Jack pretends not to notice the traces of dark smoke wafting off his knuckles, instead pressing back with his thumb over Gabriel’s fingertips, tucking them into the hollow of his palm. On the screen, the police break open the door before they arrive, escorted by a grim-faced guard. The same guard is back shortly, talking with a man in a lab coat who points at the bloody footprints. Then nothing happens for a while, and Jack is just about to speed the video up when Gabriel strides into view, stepping backwards into the bloody prints and removing them like something from a carpet cleaning infomercial.

Gabriel stiffens, his free hand coming up to cover his mouth as they watch him enter the room, shortly later watching him reverse out of it with a hand on the small of the very much alive Elzbacher’s back.

Gabriel pauses the playback. He’s gone pale, the play of expressions across his face enough to give Jack vertigo.

“I didn’t…” Gabriel stammers, wide eyes searching Jack’s pleadingly. “I swear I didn’t— That’s not me.” Slowly, carefully, he disentangles his hand from Jack’s, pulls it into his lap before it rises as if on its own volition to join his other hand at his face. He presses his fingers into his temples, between his eyebrows, covering his face. The smoke trailing his movements is becoming noticeable. “Jack,” he says, “please, I know I’ve. I’ve gone behind your back a lot lately, but please. _I didn’t do this_.”

Jack, for the first time in months, believes him. Believes that he’s telling the truth, or his truth, anyway. Gabriel lies to him, yes, but he doesn’t lie this well.

He swallows thickly, a cold weight settling in his stomach.

“Has this—” he stops himself, trying to voice the awful suspicion coiling in his gut. Whatever it is, some outside meddling — O’Deorain? He certainly has a bad feeling about the woman — or a late side-effect of the SEP — there had been a few candidates that suffered blackouts, one who even killed a nurse during one, but that attack was almost feral. He watches the footage again, Gabriel playing it with time moving forward this time. Gabriel’s lips are moving in easy conversation as he presses his palm to the scanner to unlock the door. Elzbacher looks starstruck. There’s nothing to suggest Gabriel’s not in control of himself. “Have you been losing time? Finding yourself places without knowing how you got there?”

“No! I was in my office when that happened!”

Jack pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to orient himself in this crumbling landscape of his life. Ana gone. Gabriel — unstable, possibly delusional? Base under threat. God, he can’t do this on his own.

“Jack,” Gabriel says, “I was in my office. I can prove it.” He’s already tapping his way through the security feeds again, finding a view that shows a corridor somewhere in the Blackwatch wing. “Look.”

Jack watches him skip through the footage until Gabriel appears, awkwardly attempting to sip from a cup of coffee while simultaneously scrolling through a data pad.

“Okay,” Gabriel says, pointing at the feed. “Check the time stamp. 21:14.” The figure on screen passes out of view, and Jack privately curses the day he agreed to letting Gabriel put a blind spot right over his office door.

“Gabe…” Jack says, and Gabriel’s eyes meet his, quietly begging. Jack closes his to break the contact. The siren outside blares in the silence. Jack presses his lips together between his teeth, shutting out the world for a second to just be able to _think_.

His course is already set, isn’t it, was set the moment he accepted a wider responsibility than standing at Gabriel’s shoulder. There are other people in the equation now: some days, he thinks, it feels like the whole world.

“We’ll discuss this later,” he says, reaching a hand out to squeeze Gabriel’s shoulder. “Right now we’ve got work to do.”

\---

Gabriel stews, rubbing his aching eyes. Why the _fuck_ is he sitting here, stuck in this safe little cage, while Jack is out there in a building that’s in all likelihood rigged to blow?

_Because he doesn’t trust you_ , his asshole of an inner voice informs him with something akin to glee. _Yeah, well,_ Gabriel thinks back at it. _Haven’t given him a lot of reasons to lately._

_Stay here_ , Jack had told him, like he was a child that needed protecting, or worse, a disobedient dog. A muscle in Gabriel’s jaw twitches at the memory, his mouth tasting like stale coffee and sleepless nights. Jack still tasted like toothpaste when he leaned forward for a quick kiss which neither one of them acknowledged might be goodbye.

Not much of a secret, though. Gabriel can count on one hand how many times they’ve kissed when clothes weren’t about to come off. Jack still looks flustered when it happens, which is adorable, but they don’t have the kind of relationship where Gabriel can just acknowledge a thing like that.

So here he sits, mouth tasting vile and lips still tingling, tracking Jack on the cameras with one eye while he continues his search for Singh with the rest of his attention. The bathroom where he’d last been spotted was, to nobody’s surprise, empty. Upon looking close, Jack had found paint scuffed off on the screws of one of the ceiling panels and a ventilation duct big enough for a guy Singh’s size, but not Jack’s, to crawl through. One mystery solved, if anything ending in such a frustrating fucking dead end can be called solved.

“Where now?” Jack pants in his ear, and Gabriel scrolls through a log, cross-references a map of the base.

“That duct doesn’t connect to anything else big, he’d have to come out somewhere in the Blackwatch area. I dunno, check for likely hiding places? The bomb in Rome was in a maintenance crawlspace.”

“Roger that.”

Jack shoves open a couple doors, pokes his head into a supply closet and gets himself tangled in a floor mop, huffing in annoyance as he gingerly steps over it and jogs on. If the base doesn’t get blown up, someone in maintenance is going to have a very long day restoring the damage Jack does as he punches through wall and ceiling panels, upends drawers and rips down curtains in his search.

Gabriel goes back to zipping through old camera feeds, trying to find wherever Singh came out. He can’t have opened any doors, there’d be a record of that, but he could have slipped through behind someone else. If so, he can have gotten anywhere that’s not a high security area by now.

Although… Gabriel has a feeling there’s something more going on. Moreno turning on him, whatever really happened in his quarters early this morning —

“He has to be in the vents,” he says, tapping his fingers on the desk while he wonders where Singh might be heading. He has a blueprint of how the ducts branch out through the building, but it’s a lot of work cross-referencing that with what they actually use the different areas for. “There must be a reason for killing that AC guy.”

“You think it’s connected?” Jack says, glancing up at the closest camera. He’s left his duster hanging over his chair in the ops room, sweat stains showing dark around his armpits. He’s not wearing his armor, probably had too stressed a wake-up call.

“Would be one hell of a coincidence if it wasn’t.”

“Are you sure you didn’t…”

“Didn’t _what_ , Jack.” Gabriel narrows his eyes, giving the small running figure of Jack his best glare.

“Listen, Gabe,” Jack responds, slowing down for a moment to look up at a camera, pushing sweaty hair out of his face. “I don’t think you did it — On purpose, or—”

“What the hell do you think then? I fucking _slipped?_ ”

“ _No_ , come on, _Gabe—_ I know you remember what happened in the program. Jeremy had that seizure and—”

“I’m not having seizures. Besides, the program is 25 years ago, why would I have a reaction now?”

Jack kicks down a door with a gratuitous amount of force.

“O’Deorain is doing something similar, isn’t she?” he asks, and Gabriel bites his lip. He doesn’t want Jack to know about that. He will try to stop him, and then Gabriel will have to admit how bad it’s gotten or go without treatment.

“No?” Gabriel hazards, and it’s technically true. Moira is trying to stabilize him, not enhance him. He thinks. “She’s trying to replicate the wraithing. Don’t tell the DoD.”

“Great,” Jack says with an audible scowl, then rips a cabinet door off its hinges. “A little treason too, why the hell not. My point is: I don’t think that _you_ killed him, but uh. Maybe your body did. Without you… piloting it.”

Gabriel rolls his shoulders in his safe little hideaway, trying to fend of the shivers. No. He’s not just _giving in_ to that idea without a fight for his own innocence. It’s something he has precious little of these days, and he’s damn well going to stand up for it.

“Alright, if I’d done it, wouldn’t my boots still be all gory?”

Jack sighs over the radio, moving on to another room, leaving destruction in his wake.

“I guess you cleaned them,” he says, shrugging. He looks tired: not physically, Jack by all accounts slept tonight, and his physical endurance is near limitless. But worn, defeated. Like he’s ready to give up even if Gabriel isn’t.

“Oh, I have a secret personality that does chores now? How do I turn that on.”

“Gabe, please,” Jack says, stopping just below a camera, his blood-shoot eyes looking straight through Gabriel. “Your door has a palm scanner. If they could break that, why would they even need Singh?”

Gabriel bites his tongue. He has no answer to that, thinks maybe his duplicitous brain has been shying away from thinking about it.

“Didn’t think so,” Jack says, his shoulders dropping. “Just… Keep it together. We’ll deal with that if we survive today.”

In the ops room, Gabriel hides his face in his hands for a moment and tries to stay on top of the fear. He doesn’t think Moira has brainwashed him..? He has no memory lapses he _remembers_. But then neither did Amélie Lacroix, he thinks, and she was somehow conditioned to kill her husband. Gabriel interviewed her himself before letting her out of custody and her story checked out. She definitely _seemed_ to believe it. The thought of someone doing the same to him, making him do what she did to Jack, or— Well, Ana’s already gone, his subordinates…

Or this AC technician, he thinks, though he can’t muster much of an emotional response if he’s being perfectly honest. If Talon really did make Gabriel kill him then his death is _their_ responsibility, not his, though the why of it…

Why did they want this AC tech dead, anyway? There’s got to be something about the ventilation.

It takes some digging and a few applications of the Strike Commander’s ID credentials, but finally Gabriel finds a deeply buried sensor log with live updates from the security sensors in the ventilation. In Grand Mesa, the local version of this same log file is on everyone’s shortcuts, because raccoons keep clambering into the ventilation ducts and figuring out creative ways to get them out without being bitten has become something of a sport.

He’s not sure anybody ever looks at it in Zürich. Not unless an alarm goes off. And of course the AC guy got override access to the alarms, nobody wants it to go off all the time while he’s working. He was supposed to have an escort his entire time on base, anyway — Gabriel wonders with a sinking feeling if that’s the excuse he used to walk off with the poor guy.

And nobody fucking thought to check for the key card when they found the body.

“Oh fuck,” Gabriel says, cross-referencing the series of deactivated sensors with his blueprints. “Jack. I know where he is.”

“Where!”

Gabriel squints at the blueprints and a floor plan, comparing. Singh’s in… the ceiling of the medical ward? He’s — Jesus Christ, he’s going to hit the one place not empty yet, the staff still working desperately to get their critical patients out. _Fuck_ , Gabriel thinks. This is downright evil.

“Ducts above med bay.”

“ _Shit,_ ” Jack says and takes off running. “Get me eyes!”

“Too late,” Gabriel replies, already working the door controls. “See you there.” The seal of the door breaks with a hydraulic hiss, and Gabriel lets himself fall to pieces, swirling out of the widening gap and into the empty, red-lit hallways.

\---

“No— _Gabe!_ ” Jack shouts in frustration, boots pounding the floor tiles as he takes a sharp left, catching the rails of the stairwell as he careens past and vaulting the banister. “Fucking— _get back in the ops_ _room!_ ” No answer, and Jack doesn’t know if Gabriel is ignoring him or if he’s conveniently dissolved his headset again. He grits his teeth, leaping down a flight of stairs and hitting the landing in a tight roll launching him right back to his feet. This, he thinks, is their problem. Gabe suddenly jumping off-script and expecting Jack to back him up when he doesn’t even know what the fuck he’s _doing_ is their problem.

Imagine how much better this would go if he knew where the hell this Singh guy was, exactly. In what room rather than what general part of the complex.

_Suck it up_ , he tells himself. _You were a soldier, this is what you know_.

He slows down in a moment of indecision as he reaches the entrance to the medbay. There are still people here, a couple of them shooting him questioning glances as they hasten by with an unconscious woman on a stretcher, the beeping of her heart monitor following them down the corridor. Jack swallows. How many others are left?

“Gabe?” he tries again, getting only silence in response. _For fuck’s sake, Gabriel._ If they survive this, Jack’s sending him on one of those corporate teamwork retreats. One with trust falls, lots of them. Maybe that’ll teach him that he can’t just pick a random rock and topple off of it without fucking telling anyone about it first.

Left with few other options, Jack groans in frustration and pushes open the first door to his right. It’s empty, the bed of the gurney already carried off with its occupant. It’ll do. Jack loosens his sidearm in its holster and carefully clambers atop the gurney, fingertips skirting the ceiling panes. Finding the middle of one, he punches up, feeling it buckle against his knuckles, beginning to crack under the second blow and finally breaking at the third. He shakes his hand out with a grimace, then pulls the pieces free. The ventilation duct is about two feet above the ceiling, wide enough for a man to crawl through. Jack glances uncertainly along it: The medical ward is big enough that he got lost in it, once. He can just see another, identical duct, showing dimly in the gloom some twenty feet to the side. How the _hell_ is he supposed to find Singh in this? It might as well be a maze.

Carefully, he hoists himself up, sticking to the creaking metal latticework between the ceiling tiles as he crawls over to the air duct and presses his ear to it. Nothing. He tries the next one, and is that…? Honestly he’s not sure, but he doesn’t have anything better to go on with Gabriel absent from his post, so he crawls along, stopping to listen at the side of the duct every few meters. Yeah, he thinks, there’s something in there, something that’s making scraping, shuffling sounds not very far away. He continues on his way, careful to be quiet, his heartbeat sounding loud in his ears in the silences between the loud howls of the evacuation alarm.

He’s right below Singh when the man drops something, the clang of it hitting metal making Jack jump and almost lose his balance. _This is it_.

Jack launches himself up the side of the duct, fist latching on to the metal rod it hangs suspended by and ripping it free. The metal of the air duct buckles with glacial slowness, reaching a tipping point when Singh loses his balance and lands hard inside the straining structure. Jack kicks at the next support rod, and feels them begin to fall when it snaps under his sole, metal screaming as it tears around him.

They hit the floor in a clattering cacophony, a sharp edge catching Jack across the shin and cutting a searing line of pain into his skin. Someone screams in shock, and he registers that they’ve dropped down somewhere in the central walkway, not far from some of the remaining medical staff.

“Go!” he shouts to them, never taking his eyes from the twisted wreck of fallen metal as he whips his sidearm up, thumbing the safety off. The rubble moves, the half-buried figure pushing himself to his knees. Jack’s brow furrows in confusion, his hands lowering to point the gun at the floor. “Gabe?” he asks, blinking, eyes still accustomed to the gloom from inside the ceiling. There’s an active rod of photonic explosive in Gabriel’s hand, glowing a friendly and incongruous yellow. “Did you find him?”

Gabriel’s eyes narrow as he snarls, and before Jack has time to process what’s happening he’s being tackled into the wall, Gabriel’s shoulder driving into his solar plexus and knocking the breath from his body.

“Wha-” he coughs, tensing against a series of sharp jabs as Gabriel’s fist drives repeatedly into his belly. Training kicks in and he shoves Gabriel back a few inches, enough to get an arm in between them and a grip on the collar of his hoodie. He pulls, hard and sharp and putting his weight into it, and winces at the sound Gabriel’s face makes cracking into the wall. A knife clatters to the floor between them.

_Huh_ , Jack thinks distantly, staring at the blood on it, at the blood staining his waistband. His shirt clings unpleasantly to his stomach, wet and sticky. _It’s true. You really don’t feel the knife going in._

Shocked, Jack scrambles out of reach as Gabriel groans in pain, one hand clutched over his nose, the other supporting himself against the wall.

_I was wrong about him not using blades, too._

Jack’s head is reeling, at once hyper-aware of his enhancements kicking in to reroute his circulation and keep his blood pressure up and simultaneously completely and utterly numb to his body. He should be in pain, he thinks, touching his belly, but all he can feel is… surprise. He doesn’t know what’s happening here, he sees Gabe bending down to pick up the knife, sees the stick of explosive — enough to take out the medical wing _at least_ — Gabriel coming towards him, adopting a stance Jack doesn’t recognize — and his conscious mind refuses to touch it. Won’t even parse it, just stands there dumbly as Gabe stalks towards him. _Run_ , his hindbrain yells at him. _Fight!_ Jack just… stands.

“Gabe,” he wheezes, coughing and tasting blood. “Gabe, what’s going on?”

“Oh Jack,” Gabriel says, lips curling up in a smile that looks wrong on his face. “Can’t even see what’s right in front of his face.” He lunges, suddenly close, the knife swiping for Jack’s throat and catching over his collar bones when he jerks back.

”Stop!” Jack says, frantic, like that was a useful thing to say to someone trying to cut your throat. ”I don’t—” He dodges another swipe, realizes Gabriel is trying to back him into a corner. Jack still has the gun in his hand, but he can’t bring himself to lift it up, can’t live with a world where he’s holding Gabe at gunpoint. ”I don’t understand. Where’s Singh?”

Gabriel snorts, dismissal clear on his face.

”Dead,” he says with a mean twist to his mouth. Jack backs up. The walls are coming up in his peripheral vision, blocking him in as Gabe advances. ”Don’t worry, he’ll have plenty of company.” He lunges, and Jack is ready, slamming both hands on Gabriel’s shoulder and pushing himself up, jumping high and pushing off the wall to get past him. His bleeding guts make a sickening squelch, the pain coursing through him dizzying before the blockers the program equipped him with shuts it down, and he manages to twist behind Gabriel and put a boot in the back of his knee, making him stagger.

The rod of explosive falls out of his hand, bouncing off of his foot and rolling to the side, glowing bright. Jack spares it a glance, tongue nervously pressed against the roof of his mouth. It’s supposed to be pretty impact stable, but… He grits his teeth. If it goes off it goes off, nothing he can do about that.

”That’s the same stuff Talon used in Rome,” he says, eyes locked on Gabriel’s face, trying to understand. This… Jack has had plenty of doubts about Gabriel over the last few years. He’s doubted his judgment and his conclusions, his morals and his sanity. He’s doubted their friendship and whether he ruined it when he invited Gabriel into his bed.

He has never before doubted his loyalty.

He has never even considered the possibility that they would ever be on opposite sides.

Gabriel smiles that mean smile again and drops back into his stance. Jack’s hands shake as they raise the gun. His enhancements are blocking all his pain receptors, but he can feel the blood from his stab wounds pooling at his waistband, trickling warm and sticky down his legs. He swallows nervously. The good side is that he’ll be at nearly full performance as long as there’s enough blood in his system to keep him upright. The bad side is that once his pressure drops he’ll get next to no warning before he blacks out.

”Really?” Gabriel asks with a smirk, almost coy. Like he’s flirting. ”Nah,” he says, smile widening, the tip of his tongue coming out to wet his lips. ”You’re not going to shoot me.”

Jack’s hands waver, and Gabriel lunges, the shot deafening as it goes off into the wall, plaster dust exploding from the impact and getting in Jack’s eyes. The knife slices into his arms as he blocks the cuts, taking the damage he knows his body can heal in order to get in close, close enough to twist his fingers into a solid grip in Gabriel’s clothes. He feels the blade bite into his side and then he’s dropping, pulling Gabriel towards him as he topples backwards and kicking out with a foot to launch him into the air, sending him flying down the corridor.

It’s a move Gabe should know well, and Jack fully expects him to be back in a second as he rolls to his feet, hands clutched to his bleeding stomach. Ana has used it against the both of them hundreds of times on the mats, her slighter frame and lesser strength no hindrance at all when she’s using their power against them. They’ve used it on each other as well, hellbent on sending each other flying as far as their supersoldier legs can manage, Ana standing to the side and rubbing her temples in annoyance at their antics while trying to suppress a smile.

Jack waits for several long moments, gun pointed at the sprawled heap of Gabriel lying against the wall. He can shoot him, he’s decided. Gabe’s SEP, and if a bullet through the thigh is what it’ll take to make him stay down so Jack can get to the bottom of this, then that’s what he’s going to get. Only… He still isn’t moving.

Swallowing against the dryness of his mouth, Jack makes his way over. What is going on, he asks himself, ready to jump back at any moment should Gabe try something. His head is twisted at a weird angle. Oh no, Jack thinks, numb as he crouches down, kicking the knife away before resting the muzzle of his sidearm between Gabe’s shoulder blades should this be some kind of trick. Dear God, Jack really hopes this is some kind of trick.

”No,” Jack says, voice cracking, apparently to himself because Gabriel can’t hear him anymore. His neck is broken, his eyes staring unseeingly at the wall. Jack feels for a pulse, tears rising in his eyes as he paws desperately at Gabriel’s throat. ”Please, Gabe, no.”

Mechanically, he secures and holsters his sidearm, bending down to hide his face in Gabriel’s hoodie, clinging to his back, anchoring himself as sobs shake his body. He doesn’t know if the numbness he feels crawling up his limbs is grief or if it is death finally catching up to him, and he finds he doesn’t particularly care.

_I can’t survive this_ , Jack thinks dizzily, clinging tighter. It’s been less than a month since Ana. Even if his body survives, this is more than he can take. This is where he ends. There’s a peace in just… giving up, he thinks, in falling asleep, knowing this will all be over when he wakes up.

” _Shit_ ,” a voice he never expected to hear again says, and Jack gasps as he’s manhandled onto his back, his wounds protesting at the treatment. ” _What the fuck?_ ”

\---

Gabriel Reyes has long since stopped calling things impossible. He took part in a secret government project and can since pull his own body apart into smoke and reform at will. Oxton can somehow rewind time, the tech lab is headed up by a talking gorilla from the moon, Jesse McCree can read. The world is full of wonders. So seeing his own — _clone,_ he supposes — is unsettling, but not something that will really stop him in his tracks.

Jack lying passed out on top of it will.

“Come on Jackie, eyes open,” he says, swatting at his cheek. Jack’s eyelids flicker, his lips moving slowly but no sound coming out. “ _Oh no you don’t,_ ” Gabriel mumbles while looking him over. Jack’s shirt is soaked in blood, and when he tugs it out of his pants he finds, shit, half a dozen deep and bleeding wounds scattered over his abdomen.

“ _Fucking hell,_ ” he breathes, glancing over at the body next to Jack. His own body, perfectly copied down to the faded black eye he has from sparring yesterday, and as soon as Jack is stable Gabriel is going to allow himself a moment to freak out about that.

Well, he thinks, granting the mess he’s left with one positive point. At least he didn’t murder the AC guy and forget about it.

Jack mumbles weakly, hand twitching.

“I’m here.” Gabriel takes it, presses Jack’s knuckles to his lips, hard, in something that is more a terrified squishing of soft flesh between teeth and bone than it is a kiss. “I’m here, Jack.” Desperate, Gabriel looks around. “ANGELA!” he calls, but the medical ward is empty, the last patients seemingly evacuated while he was running here. “NURSE!”

There’s no one coming, and Gabriel once again curses himself for not getting more medical training. Jack’s hand is limp in his.

_Oh fuck_ , Gabriel thinks. _Gotta do everything myself around here._

“Jack,” he says, getting no response. “Come on, _Jack._ ” Jack sags in his grip, head lolling to the floor, and Gabriel curses. His general approach in situations like this is _calling the fucking medic_. The medic is currently bleeding out in front of him.

“ _Don’t die_ ,” he orders, turning Jack on his side so he won’t choke and propping his feet up on his dead clone. “I’ll be right back.” Then he runs, skidding at the corners, slamming the door to the blood bank open, scanning the fridges. _Thank you, Angela_ , he thinks as his eyes are drawn to a red box with a big white letters spelling ‘Emergency’ on it. He pulls it out, sorting through the items. There’s a lot of stuff he doesn’t know what it is, but there are two bags of O negative blood, glittering gently with infused biotics, along with the supplies he will need. He grabs the box and an IV stand and runs back to Jack, who stays terrifyingly still even when Gabriel swats at his cheek.

Okay. He learned to do this back in basic. That was thirty years ago, but it’s been done on him enough times since. He’s had plenty of practice watching, and he hopes that counts for something.

Working as fast as he can, he sets the tourniquet and looks for a vein, easily finding one in Jack’s forearm. He dabs at it with a wipe, then takes a deep breath and slowly slides the catheter in, not daring to breathe. _Is it right? How do you tell if it’s right? Oh fuck oh fuck —_ He hooks the bloodbag in and releases the valve, watching the blood begin to flow. There’s no bruise forming around the catheter. That’s gotta be a good sign, right? Unsure what to do about the wounds — they’re not bleeding that much and Jack’s pulse seems okay, so the healing process is probably already underway — he pulls off his hoodie and wads it up against Jack’s belly, waiting for the biotics to kick in. So now… He needs to get Jack to Angela, or a hospital, but there’s also—

Hell, Gabriel doesn’t know. He’s got this clone to deal with, one who is presumably responsible for stabbing Jack, and then there’s Singh — is Singh still running wild in the base? Gabriel bites his lip, eyes scanning the surroundings.

_And that,_ he thinks, another weight landing on his shoulders as he notices the faintly glowing rod of explosive lying in the corner. _Fuck_. So there really is a bomb, where’s the rest of—

Jack makes a noise, his fingers closing around Gabriel’s knee in a feeble grasp. His eyelashes are fluttering.

“Oh thank god,” Gabriel breathes, folding over Jack to pull him into a careful hug, forehead pressed into the side of Jack’s neck. He’s sticky with sweat and blood, the stubble on his jaw scratching rough against Gabriel’s skin. Gabriel nuzzles against him, and Jack squeezes his knee, and Gabriel allows himself a moment, just one, of just holding Jack in his arms and listening to his breathing.

_He’s alive._

He’s not going to stay alive if that damn bomb goes off on top of him.

Jack is too weak to hold on as Gabriel frees himself from the embrace, frowning at the rod. There has to be a detonator somewhere. These things don’t just go off on their own. He reaches out to frisk the clone of himself for it, and stops in his tracks at the first touch.

_What the hell?_

Frowning, Gabriel skates his fingertips across the body. The texture is… _wrong_. The hoodie _looks_ like his own, but the fabric feels almost like satin, the weight of it right but not the feel. He pinches some between his fingers. It’s perfectly smooth, the shadowy spaces between the threads just variations in color, not actually shadows at all. Disturbed, he grabs a hand. The skin is more convincing, the right temperature, the right give, but still unnaturally smooth. Except for the palm and the fingers, he notices, brushing his thumb over a faintly textured fingertip. He’ll admit it, he’s impressed. Holding his own hand up alongside, the tiny ridges make a perfect copy of his prints.

_Well_ , he thinks, _that explains the door._

Still on the hunt for the detonator, he turns the body over for inspection. There’s something— His fingertips can feel a small circle in the middle of the chest, about as big as his fist, but his eyes can’t find the edges no matter how closely he looks. He picks up the discarded knife, tacky with Jack’s blood, and carefully works the tip into the edge of it, pushes, and —

“Whoa,” he says out loud, pulling back in alarm as the perfect copy of him pixelates. _This is new_. The shape before him blinks out of existence one thumbnail sized hexagon at a time, and he’s left with a small, slender omnic, the neck struts and the delicate fiber optic spine they protect severed by a blow. There’s something that looks like projector lenses all over its body, the circle he’s poking at with the knife one such lens. It has come loose in its casing, so he pries it free. _Vishkar._ It would have to be, nobody else has anything close to this kind of tech, but in case there was any doubt the bastards made sure to leave their logo on the back of the device. Gabriel will make them pay for that, oh yes he will.

Unfortunately, there is also a roughly circular space in what would correspond to the omnic’s abdomen. One with empty latches, where it used to carry something.

Cold creeping up his spine, he squeezes Jack’s shoulder and rises to his feet. The ceiling, then, or the pile of rubble where it has fallen in. And there it is, still inside the remains of the ventilation chute, missing one rod but armed and active, the seconds ticking down on the display.

3:17.

_What the fuck did he waste so much time on._

3:16.

He looks at Jack, curled up on the floor and drifting in and out of consciousness. He’s still healing, he may well bleed out if Gabriel moves him before the wounds have closed.

3:15.

_He has to get this thing away from him._

Tearing his eyes away, Gabriel picks the bomb up and runs, heading for the rooftop. He can't stop it from blowing, but he can get it away from Jack, out of the building. If it’s not in an enclosed space, the explosion won’t be as bad —

3:08.

— and he can wraith, he’ll be fine as long as he’s not caught in the rubble by the time he needs to reform.

3:02.

He slips on the smooth tiles leading out of the medical ward and almost drops the bomb, glancing over his shoulder once he regains his balance to see a smear of blood where his boot skidded. Jack’s blood. He runs faster.

2:47.

_Who the fuck decided on emergency door handles that require two hands_ , he wonders, bomb wedged awkwardly under his chin. _They have multiple agents that don’t even HAVE two hands._

2:18.

Gabriel _never_ skips leg day but at this pace he’s feeling the strain, blood pounding in his ears as he uses his free hand to pull himself around the curve and up to the next set of stairs.

1:56.

_It’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine._

1:47.

Shit, is he in the high part of the building?

1:32.

Oh thank fuck, the rooftop, finally.

1:27.

_Why the fuck is this not an emergency exit?_

1:24.

Fuck his palm is bloody the scanner’s not recognizing it fuck

1:21

Panic rising, he wipes his hand on his clothes, tries again.

1:19

His own personal time is slowing down, the smell of Jack’s blood rising sharp when he spits in his palm and tries to rub the stains off on his pants. He tries again.

Access denied.

1:15

_Fuck this fuck this fuck this, he’s Gabriel fucking Reyes and he’s not going to be held back by a fucking door._

1:10

_Who the fuck built this fucking door, it’s not budging. What did they expect someone would do from the roof anyway, steal the fucking sun??_

1:09

_Jesus Christ finally._

The wall next to the hinges break before the lock does, and Gabriel shoves his way through, blinking up into the wan sunlight. It’s bright and cold after the red tinge of the emergency lights. _Okay, good,_ he thinks, _plenty of time_. Now where to place it so it does minimum damage? The bomb in Rome leveled the building and it’s fair to assume this is at least as powerful.

1:04.

Maybe if he throws it off the ledge, what’s below here anyway…

1:01.

Yeah that’s not too bad, they’ll lose the workshop but hopefully that’s evacuated by now and—

1:00.

Traditional explosives work by driving a shock wave through the target, a shock wave that can move at up to 2000 m/s. The wave is powerful enough to shatter, even pulverize anything that gets in its way.

The SEP spent a lot of money making being pulverized something Gabriel could recover from.

Photonic explosives, on the other hand, are not even technically explosives. They’re condensed light, bound together in solid form by mediation of supercooled rubidium, and when the lattice breaks, they just revert to being light. A lot of it, condensed in a very small small space.

Gabriel gets hit with the equivalent of a bright sunlit day over the area of say, probably not greater Los Angeles but maybe Bloomington, Indiana, all in a nanosecond. He doesn’t have time to wraith — the blast is moving far faster than any signal his nerves might try to send his brain anyway.

It sears every last grain of his being. It gets inside his already unstable DNA, flipping genetic switches this way and that, finally finishing what the SEP started and making him something other than human.

And while something of him survives, what’s left, what’s being scattered amongst the ashes of the crumbling building — soon to be followed by the crumbling of the organization, unable to survive the loss of all three of its leaders — isn’t really Gabriel any more.

Not the parts he himself would have called important, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> This story brought to you by my unending ??? at movie bombs and their helpful, not-offsetted-to-kill-the-bombsquad countdown displays. Really sporting of the bombers, that. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this story! Please don't forget to head over to Bikti's social media ([tumblr](https://bikti.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/two2pizza)) to tell them they're awesome!


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